18 THé CéMé TéR Y T HE Doctor was over seventy, but he still had a big practice. When- ever Carroll came up from New York for the weekend, he found the office filled with patients waiting to see his father. They wuuld be sitting in the creased leather chairs which Carroll re- membered from childhood or standing at the windows, looking down at the cemetery across the street. That ceme-- tery had been part of the Doctor's equipment for nearly fifty years. The humor of its location was inescapable. "That where you bury your mistakes, is it, Doctor?" a patient would ask, and the Doctor would nod his head, his sil- vered reflector catching the light. He always smiled, as if he had not heard the words a thousand times before. As a rule the patients who asked t at ques- tion were the ones who were most afraid of being examined. '-'7 1t h them the Doc- tor worked the conversation around to the point where they could spring the stale joke. "As long as you don't bury me there," they would add, "that's all I care." Then they would throw back their heads in laughter, never seeing the contempt which showed in the shadow of the old man's glasses. The walls of the Doctor's waiting in my pocket in those days, or thought I had." On a bookcase filled with nineteenth- century medical annuals stood a framed, slightly faded photograph of Carroll's mother, who had died when he was seven. Once, from behind a newspaper, he had heard a woman patien t explain to her husband, "That's the Doctor's wife. She's been dead for ages. Poor man, they say he can't talk about her even now." Carroll had felt childishly angry at the woman for making him see his father through her eyes. Noone had the right to talk like that about the Doctor. No one had the right to pity him. Carroll himself refused to think of his father except as a tireless, expensive- ly tailored man who was not only the best eye specialist in town but a director of two of the local banks. Carroll and his father had always been careful to keep their conversation centred on the office. After all, they had never been able to talk as Carroll and his mother might have been able to talk. They were, they knew, too much alike to risk it. Whenever Carroll came up for a weekend, they shared their few meals in silence, walked through the park at night if the weather was fair, and went to bed early in the big, empty-seemÎ.og house. As Carrull had done since childhood, he remembered to say, "Good night. Pleasant dreams," and his father, from the adjoining room, answered, "Good night, boy. Pleasant dreams." That was as close to intimacy as they had come. Before his marriage Carroll had spent every weekend with his father. During the past few years, however, he had come up to Hartsbridge more and more infrequently. Ellen disliked trains, and she said the children were really too young to travel anyhow. Be- "ides, there was nothing for them to do in Hartsbridge. The house which to Carroll was still a kingdom of unex- plored and unexplorable won- ders waS to Ellen "the old barn." The children kissed their grandfather and listened to his stories of hunting and fishing or, if they grew restless, of his encounters with mur- derous Indians, but Ellen felt that family visits were a great strain on everyone. Without havIng spoken a word, Carroll found that his agreement with room were so completely covered with pictures that there was no space left for dustIng between their frames. Shutting his eyes in his law office in New York or on the train riding to Hartsbridge, Carroll could recall his favorites one by one, each in its place. Among the pic- tures on the north wall of the waiting room hung colored prints of the Castle of Chillon, the bell tower in Seville, and St. Peter's in Rome. The east wall was blotted out by some lithographs which the Doctor had bought on a Mediter- ranean cruise in 1926. On the south and west walls, scattered between the windows and doors, hung a series of photographs of the Doctor at the vari- ous clinics he had attended forty years ago in Vienna and Prague. These showed hIm standing, smiling and self- confident, in the midst of bearded for- eign professors. Except for the name let- tered precisely under the Doctor's feet, Carroll felt sure that none of his pa- tients would have recognized him. He was a stranger, a young Irishman with small, handsome features and a hint of the paunch which used to serve as an outward symbol of a physician's success. "Oh, I was cocky enough," the Doctor would say. 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